The Costa Mesa Historical Society is an all-volunteer group formed in 1966. The society works closely with the City of Costa Mesa and other local groups to preserve and promote local history.
Title: Putting city history in print
Author: Alan Blank
Publisher: Daily Pilot
Date: 5/7/09 It didn't take Art and Mary Ellen Goddard long to
connect to the historical pulse of Costa Mesa when they moved to
the city in 1977 from the Midwest. "After we got settled into our
house I would say the first thing Mary Ellen did was join the
historical society," Art Goddard said. Just a year later, in 1978,
she conducted a series of 46 lengthy interviews with the city
fathers and business and social leaders for the city's 25th
anniversary. The husband-and-wife team recently released a history,
"Images of Early Costa Mesa," published by Arcadia Publishing (a
company known for the thousands of local history books it produces
and puts on the shelves of retailers like Barnes & Noble and
Borders throughout the country). It's not the first history ever
published about the young city -- historian Edrick Miller wrote one
called "A Slice of Orange," and former Mayor Robert Wilson wrote
one much more recently called "From Goat Hill to City of the Arts"
-- but unlike its precursors, the Goddards' history is mainly a
visual one. The content comes largely from Mary Ellen's interviews
and similar interviews conducted by Miller, along with materials
tucked away in the historical society's archives. The book quickly
touches on early Native American history before delving into the
town's first booms around the turn of the 20th century. Instead of
a long-form, cohesive narrative, the authors analyzed collections
of old photographs that depict the city's origins and print them
with extended captions for context. "Pictures convey a lot of
information that you can't convey in text," Art said. "This allows
people to look at the photos themselves and come to their own
conclusions." For instance, a shot of the Fairview School house --
a Victorian-looking wood building with a brick chimney and a
rectangular steeple with a pyramid top -- juts out of an empty
landscape, surrounded by acres of open fields. One of the first
classes of students stands out in the sun in the front along with
the teacher, wearing a straw boater hat. The school was established
in 1891 and had only about 25 to 35 students for much of its
24-year existence, according to the authors. Another picture, which
looks like it was yanked from a Western movie, shows the two-story,
rectangular, wood-shingled Ozment's General Store, which went up in
the early 1900s as the town's first commercial building near
Newport Boulevard and East 18th Street. A horse-drawn carriage is
pulling up in front. Costa Mesa is a geographically small area. It
would be hard for a resident to read through the book and not find
several locations that they recognize. "I hope the book gives
people a sense of place and an opportunity to connect with it if
they want to," Art said.
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